Assault on Paradise: Perspectives on Globalization and Class Struggles

Chapter Eight: Marxism and Contemporary Capitalism

231 Chapter Eight Marxism and Contemporary Capitalism Overview The revival of radicalism in the world today has brought with it a search for a theoretical explanation of what is wrong with the global society. Inevitably, many radicals have turned back to Marxist models of capitalist development. But these older models, derived from the Victorian capitalism of Marx’s time, have little relevance to contemporary capitalism. An updated Marxist model, with a direct bearing on contemporary global capitalism, and offering suggestive theoretical explanations of our social ills, would be a major intellectual achievement. Introduction The task of applying the science of Marxism to the analysis of contemporary capitalist society is indeed an important one. It is also a difficult one, as the authors well know. Hence, we are under no illusion that we will have succeeded in exhausting the subject. We have no such ambitious goal. Here, we hope to help people to see things differently and more realistically, to highlight some of the central problems which need to be solved, and to indicate the direction which further study and thought should take. The reason for being very cautious is that when capitalism experiences growth, new products and new investments present less risk. Competition is minimized. More rational calculations are possible and all appears to be sweetness and light among the powers that be. But as Marx pointed out long ago, this is merely the appearance. Any capitalist or corporation that doesn’t know its fleeting character will not survive the crisis that inevitably will follow. But the capitalists, big and small, do know, most of them, and under this surface of security and amiability is the struggle for supremacy. Even in periods of prosperity it never ceases. 232 Marxism and Contemporary Capitalism Supporters of Marxism certainly believed that it provided a powerful and accurate analysis of 19th Century capitalism which was characterised by mass economic inequality and dreadful working and living conditions for members of the proletariat. Modern Marxists would argue that in the UK as in other advanced capitalist societies a dominant economic class continues to exist deriving its income mainly from its investments. However there are disputes s to the size and characteristics of this dominant economic class in that, for example writers as J. Westergaard and H. Ressler [Class in a Capitalist Society 1976]argue that this class represents perhaps 5%-10% of the UK population whereas J. Scott (who acknowledges the influences of both Marx and Weber on his work) emphasises the importance of a much smaller capitalist class of perhaps 0.1% of the population which exercises strategic control over major decisions within the economic and financial systems. Despite these disputes within Marxism all modern Marxists would agree that a dominant economic class exists citing trend data on the distribution of wealth and income. indicating only limited egalitarian redistribution in the course of the twentieth and early 21st centuries. However Marxist ideas have obviously attracted criticism from both conservatives and liberals and also from more moderate socialists and social democrats. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the German Social Democrat “ revisionist” politician Eduard Bernstein called for a revision of social democratic political strategies to take account of social and political developments such as the growth of the middle classes and his ideas were later extended and elaborated by so-called post- capitalist theorists of the 1950s and 1960s who argued that even if the Marxist theory outlined above appeared relevant to the analysis of 19th Century capitalism it was nevertheless largely irrelevant to the analysis of mid-20th Century capitalism which had evolved in directions not predicted by Marx into a post-capitalist system fundamentally different form the C19th capitalism analysed in Marxist theories. Post-Capitalist Theories According to the post -capitalist theorists of the 1950s and 1960s there were important trends toward greater economic equality between the social 233 classes and also that the economic and political powers of the capitalist class had been significantly reduced. Thus in the post-capitalist view the economic powers of the capitalist class had declined, as major industries were taken over by the State in the1940s and 5Os (although the privatization programme of the 1980s and 90s reversed this trend) and because control over private industry was passing from shareholders to specialist managers and technicians who, it was argued, would run industry not only in the interests of the owners but also in the...